Onsite optimisation is made up of many elements, but one of the most commonly overlooked is the URL, in respect of how your URL is written and structured. There are so many ecommerce and normal sites that are missing out on better rankings just because they have not thought about their URLs and how important they are.
The URL is the www part of your web address, your link to your website or your pages. A good URL should be relevant, concise and have a couple of keywords in there if possible and should explain what the customer is going to see on that page.
For example, if you were selling washing powder, then your URL should reflect this and have some mention of washing powder. Getting a couple of keywords in your URL is one of the most important onsite optimisation factors that you should really try to achieve and it is much easier to do this at the start of your websites life rather than half way through it.
If we take two theoretical examples you can then start to see the importance of making sure your URL is the best it possibly can be.
Let’s look at Two online shops both sell washing machines; one has a strongly optimised website and the other has over looked the importance of making sure the URL is structured correctly. They are both exactly the same, selling the same products and using the same ecommerce platform, but the importance of the URL really becomes noticeable when you compare the two.
Shop A has a Zanussi Washing Machine model A1002 for sale and they have their URL optimised and structured correctly so it looks like – www.shopa.co.uk/washingmachines/zanussi-washing-machine-A1002.
Shop B has the same product but has not taken care of the URL structure and will therefore have something like – www.shopb.co.uk/cat1/cat2/12838474jdyeynmamki28yndn.
If you compare the two URL’s from a search engines point of view you can quickly see how important it is to make sure you get this right from the start. A search engine will have no idea about Shop B in terms of what the page is selling, mainly because it has no mention of washing machines or even readable keywords, which means that the search engine will struggle to index this page correctly if we are just considering the URL.
Shop A not only tells the search engine that they are selling washing machines but go one step further and actually states the washing machine make and model, which should pick up specific searches as well as more general ones. If Shop A gets the rest of its SEO correct, then this shop will be ranking for not only washing machines but also specific model searches as well, which really is the best of both worlds.
Not only will this make a big difference for your natural rankings, but it can help with achieving a better keyword score if you are using Google Adwords for your pay per click campaign, because the URL is one of the scoring factors.
We are not saying that by having “good” URLs that you will rank top in Google, but this is one box you simply have to tick when considering the overall onsite optimisation and your ongoing SEO campaign. As we have said, so many sites over look this when they first go live and to then go and change it can be a nightmare, so it really is something that you do need to get right from the start if you want the most impact.